Although formal writing in Vietnam was done in literary Chinese until the early 20th century (except for two brief interludes), chữ Nôm was widely used between the 15th and 19th centuries by Vietnam's cultured elite, including women, for popular works, many in verse. One of the best-known pieces of Vietnamese literature, The Tale of Kiều, was composed in chữ Nôm.

In the 1920s, the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet displaced chữ Nôm as the preferred way to record Vietnamese. Although chữ Nôm is today only taught at the university level within the Vietnamese education system, the characters are still used for decorative, historic and ceremonial value and symbols of good luck. The task of preservation and study of Vietnamese texts written in Nôm (but also classical Chinese texts from Vietnam) is conducted by the Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies in Hanoi.

chữ nôm often capitalized chữ Nôm (𡨸喃 "characters for common speech") is the logographic writing system of the Vietnamese language. It is based on the Chinese writing system but adds a high number of new characters to make it fit the Vietnamese language. The character 𡨸 (chữ, lit. "characters") is proper to Vietnamese and is otherwise unknown in Chinese. The second character 喃 (nôm, lit. "common speech") coincidentally exists in Chinese, too, though with a different meaning. The character set for chữ nôm is extensive, more than 20,000, and has the same linguistic defects as Chinese characters in general, i.e. arbitrariness in composition and inconsistency in pronunciation.[1]

chữ Hán (𡨸漢 "Han script") and chữ nho, sometimes capitalized chữ Nho (𡨸儒 "Confucian script") are the Vietnamese terms for classical Chinese used by Vietnamese court officials and scholars in pre-modern Vietnam from the end of the Chinese domination of Vietnam until the loss of sovereignty to French Indochina. The term chữ Hán is also used in Vietnam in reference to modern Chinese. The term chữ nho is more restricted to local Vietnamese Confucian use of classical Chinese.[2]

The term Hán Nôm (漢喃) in Vietnamese, designates the whole body of Vietnamese premodern written materials, either written in Chinese (chữ hán) or in Vietnamese (chữ nôm).[4] Hán and Nôm could also be found in the same document side by side,[5] for example in the case of translations of Chinese medicine books.[6] The Buddhist history Cổ Châu Pháp Vân phật bản hạnh ngữ lục (1752) gives the story of early Buddhism in Vietnam both in Hán script and in a parallel Nôm translation.[7] The Jesuit Girolamo Maiorica (1605–1656) had also used parallel Hán and Nôm texts.

A page from Tự Đức Thánh Chế Tự Học Giải Nghĩa Ca (嗣德聖製字學解義歌), a 19th-century primer for teaching Vietnamese children Chinese characters. The work is attributed to Emperor Tự Đức, the 4th Emperor of the Nguyễn Dynasty. In this primer, chữ Nôm is used to gloss the Chinese characters, for example, 𡗶 is used to gloss 天.

Chinese characters were introduced to Vietnam after the Han Empire conquered the country in 111 BC. Independence was achieved in 939, but Literary Chinese was adopted for official purposes in 1010.[8] For most of the period up to the early 20th century, formal writing was indistinguishable from contemporaneous classical Chinese works produced in China, Korea, or Japan.[9]

Vietnamese scholars were thus intimately familiar with Chinese writing. In order to record their native language, they applied the structural principles of Chinese characters to develop chữ nôm. The new script was mostly used to record folk songs and for other popular literature.[10] Vietnamese written in chữ Nôm briefly replaced Chinese for official purposes under the Hồ Dynasty (1400–1407) and under the Tây Sơn (1778–1802), but in both cases this was swiftly reversed.[11]

The use of Chinese characters to write the Vietnamese language can be traced to an inscription with the two characters "布蓋", as part of the posthumous title of Phùng Hưng, a national hero who succeeded in temporarily gaining back the control of the country from the hands of the Chinese during the late 8th century. These two characters literally mean "cloth" + "cover" but are evidently used for phonetic value not the Chinese meaning. They may represent Vietnamese vua cái ("great king"), or archaic Vietnamese bố cái ("father and mother", i.e. as respectable as one's parents). During the 10th century, the founder of the Đinh Dynasty (968-979) named the country Đại Cồ Việt (大瞿越). The second character of this title is another early example of using Chinese characters to represent Vietnamese native words, although which word it represents is unknown.[12][13]

The oldest surviving objects with Chữ Nôm inscriptions are a stele at a temple at Bảo Ân (1209) containing 18 characters naming villages and people, and a stele at Hộ Thành Sơn in Ninh Bình Province (1343), listing 20 villages.[14][15]

The first literary writing in Vietnamese is said to have been an incantation in verse composed in 1282 by the then Minister of Justice Nguyễn Thuyên and thrown into the Red River to expel a menacing crocodile.[14] The oldest Nom text that is still extant is the collected poetry of Emperor Trần Nhân Tông written in the 13th century.[16]

During the seven years of the Hồ Dynasty (1400–07) Chinese script was discouraged in favor of chữ Nôm, which became the official script. This was reversed with the subsequent fourth Chinese domination and twenty years in which use of the vernacular language and demotic script were suppressed.[17]

During the Ming dynasty occupation of Vietnam, chữ Nôm printing blocks, texts and inscriptions were destroyed; as a result the earliest surviving texts of chữ nôm post-date the occupation.[18]Nguyễn Trãi (1380–1442) wrote both Han and Nom literature in the 15th century.[19] Trinh Thi Ngoc Truc, consort of King Lê Thần Tông, is given credit for a 24,000-character bilingual Han-to-Nom dictionary written in the 17th century.[20]

While intended to record Vietnamese, chữ Nôm paradoxically required the user to have a fair knowledge of written Chinese, and thus chữ Nôm was used primarily for literary writings by cultural elites (such as the poetry of Nguyễn Du and Hồ Xuân Hương), while almost all other official writings and documents continued to be written in chữ Nho (or chữ Hán) as Hán Văn (classical Chinese) until the 20th century.

Usually only the elite had knowledge of chữ Nôm, which was used as an aid to teaching Chinese characters.[21] After the emergence of chữ Nôm, a great amount of Vietnamese literature was produced by many notable writers, among them Nguyễn Trãi of the 15th century, who left us the first surviving collection of Nôm poems. There was a flowering of popular literature written in Nom during the late 18th century and early 19th century, which saw the production of Nguyễn Du's Tale of Kieu[22] and the poetry of Hồ Xuân Hương. Although only 3 to 5 percent of the population was literate,[23] nearly every village had someone who could read Nom aloud for the benefit of other villagers.[24] Thus these works were circulated orally in the villages, so that even the illiterate had access to the Nôm literature.[25]

In 1838, Jean-Louis Taberd wrote a Nom dictionary that eventually gained wide acceptance and circulation.[26] In 1867, Catholic scholar Nguyễn Trường Tộ petitioned King Tự Đức to replace Han with Nom. The king did not consent to this, but he did respond with various efforts to promote Nom. A decree was issued which praised the script as Quốc Âm, i.e. the national pronounciation.[27]

From the latter half of the 19th century onwards, the French colonial authorities discouraged or simply banned the use of classical Chinese, and promoted the use of the Vietnamese alphabet, which they viewed as a stepping stone toward learning French. Language reform movements in other Asian nations stimulated Vietnamese interest in the subject. Following the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Japan was increasingly cited as a model for modernization. The Confucian education system was compared unfavorably to the Japanese system of public education. According to a polemic by writer Phan Châu Trinh, "so-called Confucian scholars" lacked knowledge of the modern world, as well as real understanding of Han literature. Their degrees showed only that they had learned how to write characters, he claimed.[28]

The popularity of Hanoi's short-lived Tonkin Free School suggested that broad reform was possible. In 1910, the colonial school system adopted a "Franco-Vietnamese curriculum", which emphasized French and alphabetic Vietnamese. The teaching of Chinese characters was discontinued in 1917.[29] On December 28, 1918, Emperor Khải Định declared that the traditional writing system no longer had official status.[29] The traditional Civil Service Examination, which emphasized the command of classical Chinese, was dismantled in 1915 in Tonkin and was given for the last time at the imperial capital of Huế on January 4, 1919.[29] The examination system, and the education system based on it, had been in effect for almost 900 years.[29]

The decline of the Chinese script also led to the decline of chữ Nôm given that Nôm and Chinese characters are so intimately connected.[30] During the early half of the 20th century, chữ Nôm gradually died out as quốc ngữ grew more and more standardized and popular. In an article published in 1935 by Cordier he stated that quốc ngữ is rapidly dethroning Chinese characters and is replacing chữ Nôm so that by 1935 out of one hundred literate persons 70 knew quốc ngữ, 20 knew chữ Nôm and 10 knew Chinese characters.[31]

The syntax of nôm naturally follows Vietnamese grammar not Chinese grammar. For example in nôm texts the Trịnh lords (1545–1787) are Chúa Trịnh (chữ Nôm: 主鄭) not as in Sino-Vietnamese Trịnh vương (chữ Hán: 鄭王). Here the character used (lord in Vietnamese, king in Chinese) is also different, but the difference in syntax is that in Vietnamese the noun "lord" precedes the name, whereas in Chinese "king" follows the name.

A similar example, in Vietnamese Truyện Kiều (傳翹, lit. "Tale of Kiều") the word "tale" precedes the name, but in Chinese syntax "tale" (truyện傳) should follow the name Kiều. The nôm term "Chữ Nôm" itself is an example of this. In Vietnamese nôm syntax the noun "script" (𡨸) precedes "common" (喃), whereas in chữ Hán the order is reversed and a purely Chinese chữ Hán character used instead of the locally created Chữ (chữ Hán: 喃字). Similarly with gods and heroes; the syntax of the popular name Thánh Gióng (聖容) differes from his chữ Hán name Phù Đổng Thiên Vương (扶董天王); the nôm name Mẫu Thoải (母水), has a Vietnamese syntax while her chữ Hán name Thủy cung Thánh Mẫu (水宮聖母) exhibits Chinese syntax. The official Chinese Tên chữ and vernacular Tên nôm for village names may also have different syntax as well as different characters.[33]

Chinese poems translated into Nôm could retain more Chinese syntax and poetic forms than those translated into Korean or Japanese.[34] Though as literature in Nôm developed it increasingly freed itself from Chinese syntax.[35]

"My mother eats vegetarian food at the temple every Sunday", written in the modern Vietnamese alphabet (blue) and Nom. Characters borrowed unchanged from Chinese are shown in green, while invented characters are brown.

Unmodified Chinese characters were used in chữ Nôm in three different ways.

A large proportion of Vietnamese vocabulary had been borrowed from Chinese from the Tang period. Such Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary could be written with the original Chinese character for each word, for example:[37]

To represent a native Vietnamese word, one method was to use a Chinese character for a Chinese word with a similar meaning. For example 本 may also represent vốn ("capital, funds"). When a character would have two readings, a diacritic may be added to the character to indicate the "indigenous" reading. Thus when 本 is meant to be read as vốn, it is written as 本㆑, with a diacritic at the upper right corner. In this case the word vốn is actually an earlier Chinese loan that has become accepted as Vietnamese; William Hannas claims that all such readings are similar early loans.[37]

Alternatively, a native Vietnamese word could be written using a Chinese character for a Chinese word with a similar sound, regardless of the meaning of the Chinese word. For example, 沒 (Early Middle Chinese /mət/[41]) may represent the Vietnamese word một ("one").[42]

This is the Nom character for phở, a popular soup made from rice noodles. It is scheduled for inclusion in an upcoming extension of Unicode.[a] The radical 米 on the left suggests that the meaning of the character is linked to rice. The remainder 頗 is a phonetic, a Chinese character used to indicate pronunciation.

In contrast to the few hundred Japanese kokuji and handful of Korean gukja, which are mostly rarely used characters for indigenous natural phenomena, Vietnamese scribes created thousands of new characters, used throughout the language.[43]

As in the Chinese writing system itself, the most common kind of invented character in Nom is the phono-semantic compound, made by combining two characters or components, one suggesting the word's meaning and the other its approximate sound. For example,[44]

𠀧 (ba "three") is composed of the phonetic part 巴 (EMc /paɨ/[45]) and the semantic part 三 "three". "Father" is also ba, but written as 爸 (⿱父巴), while "turtle" is con ba ba (昆蚆蚆; ⿰虫巴).

A smaller group consists of semantic compound characters, which are composed of two Chinese characters representing words of similar meaning. For example, 𡗶 (giời "sky", "heaven") is composed of 天 ("sky") and 上 ("upper").[44]

A few characters were obtained by modifying Chinese characters related either semantically or phonetically to the word to be represented. For example,[47]

the Nôm character 𧘇 (ấy "that', "those") is a simplified form of the Chinese character 衣 with a similar EMC pronunciation /ʔijh/;[48]

the Nôm character 爫 (làm "work", "labour") is a simplified form of the Chinese character 為 with related meaning "make, do".

In Korea and Japan, the traditional writing system was simplified so it could be taught to the general public.[49] Vietnam's educated class looked down on Nom as inferior to Han, so it was not interested in doing the work required to turn Nom into a form of writing suitable for mass communication.[50] Like Chinese, Vietnamese is a tonal language and has nearly 5,000 distinct syllables.[8] Neither the Korean nor the Japanese writing systems indicate tones, so they cannot be applied to the Vietnamese language.[9]

The website chunom.org gives a frequency table of the 586 most common characters in Nom literature. According to this table, the most common 50 characters are as follows, with the modern spelling given in italics:[51]

In 1867, the reformist Nguyễn Trường Tộ proposed a standardization of chữ Nôm (along with the abolition of classical Chinese), but the new system, what he called quốc âm Hán tự (國音漢字 lit. "Han characters with national pronunciations"), was rejected by Emperor Tự Đức.[52] To this date, chữ Nôm has never been officially standardized. As a result, a Vietnamese word can be represented by variant Nôm characters. For example, the very word chữ ("character", "script"), a Chinese loan word, can be written as either 字 (Chinese character), 𡦂 (invented character, "compound-semantic") or 𡨸 (invented character, "semantic-phonetic"). For another example, the word béo ("fat", "greasy") can be written either as 脿 or . Both characters are invented characters with a semantic-phonetic structure, the difference being the phonetic indicator (表 vs. 報).

In 1993, the Vietnamese government released an 8-bit coding standard for alphabetic Vietnamese (TCVN 5712:1993, or VSCII), as well as a 16-bit standard for Nom (TCVN 5773:1993).[53] This group of glyphs is referred to as "V0." In 1994, the Ideographic Rapporteur Group agreed to include Nom characters as part of Unicode.[54] A revised standard, TCVN 6909:2001, defines 9,299 glyphs.[55] About half of these glyphs are specific to Vietnam.[55] Nom characters not already encoded were added to Unicode Extension B.[55] (These characters have five-digit hexadecimal codepoints. The characters that were encoded earlier have four-digit hex.)

The V2, V3, and V4 proposals were developed by a group at the Han-Nom Research Institute led by Nguyễn Quang Hồng.[55] V4, developed in 2001, includes over 400 ideograms formerly used by the Tay people of northern Vietnam.[55] This allows the Tay language to get its own registration code.[55] V5 is a set of about 900 characters proposed in 2001.[55] As these characters were already part of Unicode, the IRG concluded that they could not be edited and no Vietnamese code was added.[55] (This is despite the fact that national codes were added retroactively for version 3.0 in 1999.) The Nom Na Group, led by Ngô Thanh Nhàn, published a set of nearly 20,000 Nom characters in 2005.[57] This set includes both the characters proposed earlier and a large group of additional characters referred to as "V6".[55] These are mainly Han characters from Trần Văn Kiệm's dictionary which were already assigned codepoints. Character readings were determined manually by Hồng's group, while Nhàn's group developed software for this purpose.[58] The work of the two groups was integrated and published in 2008 as the Hán Nôm Coded Character Repertoire.[58]

The characters that do not exist in Chinese have Han-Viet readings that are based on the characters given in parenthesis. The common character for càng (強) contains the radical 虫 (insects).[59] This radical is added redundantly to create , a rare variation shown in the chart above. The character (giàu) is specific to the Tay people.[60] It is not yet part of the Unicode character set.[c] It is a variation of 朝, the corresponding character in Vietnamese.[61]

^Hannas 1997, p. 82: "The linguistic defects are the same as those noted throughout this book for Chinese characters generally, caused by the large number of tokens (some twenty thousand in chu' nom), the arbitrariness of their composition, and the inconsistent "

^Nguyễn Đình Hòa Vietnamese London Oriental and African Language Library Vol.9. John Benjamins Publishing Company 1997 Page 6 "1.7 Writing Systems - The language has made use of three different writing systems: first, the Chinese characters, ... 1.7.1 Chữ nho or chũ Hán - Chinese written symbols, shared with Japanese and Korean—the two other Asian cultures that were ... Indeed from the early days of Chinese rule (111 B.C. to A.D. 939) the Chinese governors taught the Vietnamese not only Chinese calligraphy, but also the texts of Chinese history, philosophy and classical literature (while the spoken language ..."

^Effective Designs of the Computer-Assisted Chinese Learning Program for Beginning Learners of Chinese Characters MT Lu, G Hallman, J Black 2010 "A character is a logograph used in written Taiwanese (Hanji), written Japanese (Kanji), written Chinese (Hanzi), written Korean (Hanja), and written Vietnamese (hán tự). A logograph is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme."

^Asian research trends: a humanities and social science review - No 8 to 10 - Page 140 Yunesuko Higashi Ajia Bunka Kenkyū Sentā (Tokyo, Japan) - 1998 "Most of the source materials from premodern Vietnam are written in Chinese, obviously using Chinese characters; however, a portion of the literary genre is written in Vietnamese, using chu nom. Therefore, han nom is the term designating the whole body of premodern written materials.."

^Vietnam Courier 1984 Vol20/21 Page 63 "Altogether about 15,000 books in Han, Nom and Han—Nom have been collected. These books include royal certificates granted to deities, stories and records of deities, clan histories, family genealogies, records of cutsoms, land registers, ..."

^Khắc Mạnh Trịnh, Nghiên cứu chữ Nôm: Kỷ yếu Hội nghị Quốc tế về chữ Nôm Viện nghiên cứu Hán Nôm (Vietnam), Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation - 2006 "The Di sản Hán Nôm notes 366 entries which are solely on either medicine or pharmacy; of these 186 are written in Chinese, 50 in Nôm, and 130 in a mixture of the two scripts. Many of these entries ... Vietnam were written in either Nôm or Hán-Nôm rather than in 'pure' Chinese. My initial impression was that the percentage of texts written in Nôm was even higher. This is because for the particular medical subject I wished to investigate-smallpox-the percentage of texts written in Nom or Hán-Nôm is even higher than is the percentage of texts in Nôm and Hán-Nôm for general medical and pharmaceutical .."

^Wynn Wilcox Vietnam and the West: New Approaches 2010- Page 31 "At least one Buddhist text, the Cổ Châu Pháp Vân phật bản hạnh ngữ lục (CCPVP), preserves a story in Hán script about the early years of Buddhist influence in Vietnam and gives a parallel Nôm translation."

^ abMarr 1984, p. 141: "Because the Chinese characters were pronounced according to Vietnamese preferences, and because certain stylistic modifications occurred over time, later scholars came to refer to a hybrid "Sino-Vietnamese" (Han-Viet) language. However, there would seem to be no more justification for this term than for a Fifteenth Century "Latin-English" versus the Latin written contemporaneously in Rome."

^Keith Weller Taylor The Birth of Vietnam 1976 - Page 220 "The earliest example of Vietnamese character writing, as we have noted earlier, is for the words bo and cai in the posthumous title given to Phung Hung. Although Vietnamese character writing was eventually developed for literary purposes"

^Hannas 1997, p. 83: "An exception was during the brief Hồ Dynasty (1400–07), when Chinese was abolished and chữ Nôm became the official script, but the subsequent Chinese invasion and twenty-year occupation put an end to that (Helmut Martin 1982:34)."

^Mark W. McLeod, Thi Dieu Nguyen Culture and Customs of Vietnam 2001 Page 68 - "In part because of the ravages of the Ming occupation — the invaders destroyed or removed many Viet texts and the blocks for printing them — the earliest body of nom texts that we have dates from the early post-occupation era ..."

^B.N. Ngo The Vietnamese Language Learning Framework - Journal of Southeast Asian Language and Teaching, 2001 "... to a word, is most frequently represented by combining two Chinese characters, one of which indicates the sound and the other the meaning. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century many major works of Vietnamese poetry were composed in chữ nôm, including Truyện Kiều"

^Phan Châu Trinh, "Monarchy and Democracy", Phan Châu Trinh and His Political Writings, SEAP Publications, 2009, ISBN 978-0-87727-749-1, p. 126. This is a translation of a lecture Chau gave in Saigon in 1925. "Even at this moment, the so-called "Confucian scholars (i.e. those who have studied Chinese characters, and in particular, those who have passed the degrees of cử nhân [bachelor] and tiến sĩ [doctorate]) do not know anything, I am sure, of Confucianism. Yet every time they open their mouths they use Confucianism to attack modern civilization – a civilization they do not comprehend even a tiny bit."

^The Columbia History of Chinese Literature -Victor H. Mair - 2012 Page 1097 -"Chinese vocabulary was largely kept in place even in poetic writings in Vietnamese using chu nom (adapted from the sinographs) phonetics. Chinese poetic forms could be maintained without the radical restructuring required by translation to a foreign syntax required in Japan and Korea.

^The Vietnamese novel in French: a literary response to colonialism -Jack Andrew Yeager, University of New Hampshire - 1987 Page 30 "Nom would eventually free itself of the influence of Chinese syntax and, with the gradual hardening of Confucian philosophy, become more important than Chinese for literary production in Viet Nam. By the eighteenth century, important ..."

^Marr 1984, pp. 141–142: "By the same token, some women developed word skills to the point where they could outmatch any male participants — much to the delight of their peers.9 Partly as a means to capture Vietnamese folklore in writing, the literati gradually improvised a separate ideographic system to accord with the sounds and syntax of the spoken language.10 known subsequently as nom, this unique Vietnamese script unfortunately remained even more unwieldy than the Chinese from which it was spawned. Unlike Japanese kana or Korean Hangul/no process of character simplification that resulted in a basic set of phonemes or syllables. Some of the problem lay in the tonal and nonagglutinative nature of Vietnamese as contrasted with Japanese or Korean.11 More important, however, was the attitude of most Vietnamese literati, who continued to regard Chinese as the ultimate in civilized communication and thus considered nom a form of recreation."

^Marr 1984, pp. 141–142: "Known subsequently as nom, this unique Vietnamese script unfortunately remained even more unwieldy than the Chinese from which it was spawned. Unlike Japanese kana or Korean hangul, there was no process of character simplification that resulted in a basic set of phonemes or syllables."

^Marr 1984, p. 142: "More important, however, was the attitude of most Vietnamese literati, who continued to regard Chinese as the ultimate in civilized communication and thus considered nom a form of recreation...Meanwhile, the minority of the literati who took nom writing seriously had to be careful not to offend the fraternity or be accused of subversion through circulating 'vulgar' texts."